NASA’s OCO-2 Satellite Launch

The original July 1 launch was delayed 24 hours due to a technical glitch in the water lines for an acoustic suppression system in the launch pad.  The delay to yesterday morning, July 2, enabled +Lori Hibbett and I to pick a new shooting location above the coastal fog.

The video looks best watched on +YouTube in HD resolution, full screen:

This is a composite shot covering four minutes of NASA’s OCO-2 satellite’s journey into space after its launch on a Delta II rocket.

You can see the solid rocket boosters separating and falling towards the right side of the rocket’s trail.

2:58 a.m. local (5:58 a.m. EDT; 0958 GMT)
T+plus 1 minute, 50 seconds. “The ATK-made solid rocket boosters have jettisoned from the first stage. They remained attached until the rocket cleared off-shore oil rigs.”

You can also clearly see where the second stage ignites towards the left:

3:01 a.m.
T+plus 4 minutes, 39 seconds. MECO. The first stage main engine cutoff is confirmed and the spent stage has been jettisoned.

T+plus 4 minutes, 44 seconds. The Delta’s second stage has ignited! The engine is up and running.

T+plus 4 minutes, 51 seconds. The rocket’s nose cone enclosing the satellite payload has been jettisoned.

For the longer time-lapse video surrounding the launch, I started capturing thirty-second exposures at 10:32 pm and had it continue during and past the launch, to 4:10 am. I was shooting a time-lapse sequence on a star-tracking mount, having the camera pan to follow the Milky Way across the sky to where the satellite would launch at 3 am.

The composite image uses nine of those photos, to capture the foreground well lit during the initial liftoff, The sky and Milky Way in the image with the rocket and solid boosters falling away, plus seven more flight segments including the first stage separation.

The individual images were assembled in the free StarStaX software.

https://www.youtube.com/user/JeffSullivanPhoto
#NASA   #NASAJPL   #NASASocial   #rocketlaunch   #nightphotography   #astrophotography
NASA OCO-2 Satellite Launch July 2, 2014 – HD

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